Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #719, 10/12/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #719, 10/12/14

This Summer In the Inq: Hamas-Israel War as “The Gaza War”

Philly Inquirer house world affairs columnist Trudy Rubin’s Inq “Worldview” column’s lede on July 17 described this summer’s Israel-Hamas war as one in which “Israeli air strikes are matching Hamas rockets number for number.” The missing moral non-equivalence in this tit-for-tat “matching” of Israeli air strikes and Hamas rockets “number for number” is the difference between Israel warning Arab civilians of impending air strikes and Hamas intentionally targeting Israeli civilians in towns and cities. But focus on how the Inq, in Ms. Rubin’s article’s lede and in its headline, defined the battleground of this summer’s Israel-Hamas war.

Inq, Thursday, 7/17/14, A14:

WORLDVIEW
Awful Truths About Gaza War

Here’s the awful truth about the Gaza war in which Israeli air strikes are matching Hamas rockets number for number.

This “Gaza War” mischaracterization was exacerbated by the Inq’s overwhelming selection of Gaza photos, unbalanced by Israel photos, accompanying Israel-Hamas war articles. The Inq festooned even articles on a lone mile-away-landing rocket inducing international avoidance of Israel’s airport and of thousands of Israelis fleeing their southern Israel homes to escape Hamas rockets with photos of Gaza.

The image passed on to readers is one of Israel inflicting one-way harm upon Arabs. This was exacerbated, to be sure, by media repetition (continued into last week in the Inq, see BSMW #718) of not just the vast percentage of casualties being Gazans, but [hotly denied by Israel] “the vast majority of them [emphasis added] civilians.”

A recent BSMW issue described totally germane photos of Israel. These Israel photos showed civilians huddled in bomb shelters, crouching with their little kids beside cars pulled to the side of the road, an elderly woman lying by the roadside with wildflowers for her protection, etc. Those photos belonged in an Inq.

Two internet articles this week provide vivid text description that, notwithstanding the difference in the sides’ respective casualty counts, this summer’s war was an Israel-Hamas war, not “the Gaza war,” as though Israeli civilians were immune to attacks upon them. And then I want you to compare these two articles this week with how the Inq headlined a news service article it ran this summer that did give a glimpse of the war’s effect on Israelis.

Friday’s Daily Alert referenced an IDF release Friday (10//10/14), titled “The IDF Invests in Life – The Reason for Israel’s Low Civilian Casualty Count.” It lists four reasons more Israeli civilians weren’t killed, none of which is that Hamas wasn’t trying to kill them. Reason #1, “Real Time Alerts,” is a warning alarm, without false alarms, that has to reach all, but only all, threatened civilians, to give them the maximum time to take cover. Reason #2, “Iron Dome.” The system, activated only to intercept rockets “heading toward populated areas,” detected more than 750, each of which “would have hit a civilian populated area, potentially causing severe damage and casualties.” Reason #3, “Preparing the Public,” is the IDF providing life saving instructions of what to do when the sirens go off. “We have a special explainer for every audience – children, orthodox Jews, blind people, Druze, Arabs, every single part of the public.” Reason #4, “Emergency Medical Treatment.”

Tuesday (10/7/14), Tablet Magazine ran a piece, “Why the Gaza War [by me, not the best of word choices, but perhaps an explanation in itself for the article’s point] Looked Different on Israeli TV Than It Did On CNN.” Two paragraphs of this news coverage difference analysis drive home what Israelis went through this summer.

During the 50 days of the war in Gaza, Israelis, and the rest of the world were watching two completely different wars. In Israel, the country was under attack and it was all happening on live television: The camera leaped between different cities being targeted – showing the rocket’s trajectory from the Gazan border, the subsequent sirens, and civilians taking shelter in Israel, and, often, the rocket’s interception by the Iron Dome anti-missile system several minutes later – moments of deep anxiety, over and over, throughout the day. Israeli networks co-operating followed by relief, with the IDF’s Home Front Command aired banners clearly stating which region was under attack, and in some areas where the sirens weren’t loud enough, this turned out to be life-saving information.

It might be difficult for an outsider to understand, but when your child is spending their summer vacation running to find shelter – with merely a 15-second warning in the south, 90 seconds in Tel Aviv – one has limited emotional capacity to see what is happening to the children on the other side. When you add to that the fact Hamas controlled all data and information coming from Gaza – and banned Israeli reporters – you see the juxtaposition emerging. The world showed the war in Gaza, and its effect on Gazans, while on Israel television, Gaza was a sidebar. [emphasis added]

On July 10, 2014 (Inq, 7/10/14, A14), the Inq ran a Washington Post article that took a stab, not too terribly badly for the mainstream Western media, at depicting the war’s effect on civilians in Tel Aviv. It led with two Israeli friends meeting for a quick coffee following “the latest barrage of rockets aimed at this city from Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.” One told the reporter, “We had to get out and feel that our life is normal, to make sure that it’s business as usual.”

The article followed this show of bravado with observing that business in Tel Aviv “did seem to be moving along in typical fashion,” despite Gazans having “launched rockets farther into Israel than ever before,” that in Tel Aviv “a surreal atmosphere of normalcy has persisted.” It quoted the deputy mayor declaring despite what the reporter described as rockets “which had intermittently sent residents running for shelter throughout Tuesday and Wednesday [the previous day and that day], ‘tonight the restaurants, bars and pubs will all be packed as usual.’”

The reporter went on that 105 rockets had been fired at Israel that day, of which 23 had been struck down by Iron Dome, “which is deployed around major cities,” and that the other 82 had “hit Israel throughout the day.”

The article ended by quoting one of the quick-coffee meeting friends of the lede that he’d been to the movies the previous night, but wore his “nicer pajamas” to bed “just in case another siren went off and we had to go into the public bomb shelter. You have to make sure that you are dressed appropriately.”

This is how the Inq headlined this article about Tel Aviv on a Wednesday on which it was targeted by rockets “which had intermittently sent residents running for shelter throughout Tuesday and Wednesday”:

Thanks to ‘Iron Dome.’ Tel Aviv is a World Apart
Despite Sirens, Missile Shield Maintains the Calm

Does it really? Or just to those who want publics in the West to believe “the Gaza war” saw almost exclusively Gaza life-disrupting trauma and casualties, “the vast majority of them civilian.”

Regards,
Jerry